In Short – Issue 2 (Winter 2025)

January 31, 2025

Image credit: Edward Plumer

Childhood Cranes

By Andrew Bertaina

The professor told his students that they needed to focus on a singular image in order to make their poems better. He said, imagine the crane, the angle of its beak, yellowed eyes, slender, dark legs, and the way the crane stood in a muddy rice field, their soft white wings held at their sides, the way their elongated bodies made flight look like more of an achievement. Focus, he said, on the rice fields of your childhood, the way your memory of those cranes, or were they egrets, was intertwined with long drives back on the 99, which you took, almost exclusively when you were returning from a trip to your father’s, whom you saw rarely. 

Focus, he said, on the cranes, but he’d be thinking of those flooded rice fields, the egrets, for they were egrets, falling as snow on a football field-sized piece of land reflecting sunlight, the way the insects used to pitter patter as rain across the windshield, this is ages ago, he would say, long before the insects started to die off because of all the pesticides. Maybe focus on the child in the car listening to the sound of the rain, and the way the sunlight fell in columns through the dusty rows of almond trees. 

Professor, his students might interrupt, you’ve lost the image you told us to stick with. What happened to the crane? And he’d realize he was a hypocrite twice over, once, for divorcing his wife as he swore, he’d never do, and again, for leaving the image of the crane. 

He’d say, imagine rain falling across the flooded landscape of childhood. Imagine the crane’s soft feathers, gleaming in the autumn air. Imagine the boy, thinking across three decades about the fields, about disappointment, about the way he’d never be a child again, about the way the birds fell as snow in the long tracks of memory.

Andrew Bertaina (he/him) is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus Books), and the short story collection, One Person Away From You (Moon City Press). His essays have been listed as notable in three editions of the Best American Essays.